It is safe to say that many were surprised with how good the camera on the Pixel 2 phones was. This is because in the past, Google's Nexus lineup was never really known for having outstanding cameras, and with the Pixel 2 achieving Portrait Mode purely using software , it was rather impressive. The good news for developers who wish to take advantage of the Pixel 2's Portrait Mode is that Google has released the deep learning model behind the technology. This means that developers will be able to get a peek under the hood and potentially apply Google's technology to their own creations. In...Read more ...

Microsoft is taking on Google in one of its most famous areas of expertise- deep learning neural networks -to create translation tech that could make foreign news and information more accessible to people across the globe. In an announcement today, Microsoft revealed that its researchers in Asia and the US have created an AI translator that has “achieved human parity”, meaning that its translations are on par with what a professional human translator could accomplish. Microsoft's language research teams tested their AI on an open-source test set of Chinese news stories from last year that...Read more ...

Arguably, one of the best features on the Google Pixel 2 and 2 XL is Google's implementation of ‘Portrait mode' and now the technology which underpins that feature has been made open source through the company's TensorFlow AI framework. Google made the announcement on Monday via its Research Blog noting how it hopes others will be able to use the feature to further improve on, and make better use of the technology through the creation of new use cases.
One of the reasons Google's Portrait mode has proved so popular is due to the fact that it does not rely on a secondary camera to create...Read more ...

Many of Google's machine learning efforts are open sourced so that developers can take advantage of the latest advancements. The latest release is for semantic image segmentation, or the technology behind the Pixel 2's single lens portrait mode.
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